In present day television broadcast systems, often use is made of electronic program guides (EPG), which provide to a user information concerning TV programs. EPG-data is transmitted together with TV-signals, nowadays more and more in the form of digital communication.
EPG's or EPG applications in general are designed to allow a user to watch television programs whilst browsing available channel and program information, e.g. for up to eight days ahead. This information can be presented in a multi-channel grid view or a single channel list view on a television screen. The application will allow (where hardware and middleware permits) the setting of reminder memos, recording memos and ongoing recordings for a series of related programmes. Other functionality may include locking/unlocking of channels, setting/unsetting of favourites and signalling of specific channel and program properties (e.g. HD or copy protection).
TV Anytime (TVA) is an ETSI standard for describing TV related broadcast, scheduled and on-demand content, and is used to transfer EPG related data. Despite the formulation of this standard, implementation details are left to the institutions using the standard. TV Anytime is used as an end-to-end metadata model for transferring data from potential 3rd parties, such as listings providers or other metadata providers (for example on- demand content), into back-end systems of service providers, such as cable operators, all the way through to a set top box (STB) in a consumer's premises in an auditable fashion. The data model associated with TVA is extensive enough to cope with information introduced at a source and can be propagated all the way through to the STB.
Sections 6.2 and 6.7, page 37, paragraph 5 of the prior art document from ETSI “ETSI TS 102 822-2 V1.4.1: Broadcast and On-line Services: Search select and rightful use of content on personal storage systems (“TV Anytime”); Part 2, Phase 1—System description”, discloses that binary encoding of XML data using the BiM standard is used in order to save transmission bandwidth. Also it is indicated that the use of alternative binary encoding schemes may be possible, but none are specifically mentioned.